


Different Kind of Story

by sergeant_angel



Category: Dracula - Bram Stoker, Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, OUAT needs more literary characters, Vampires, alternating viewpoints, mentions of True Blood, nerds, so guess what i'm doing, swanqueen if you squint, victor is brains mina is brawn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-02
Updated: 2017-02-02
Packaged: 2018-09-21 13:21:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9550853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sergeant_angel/pseuds/sergeant_angel
Summary: Undead, mad scientist, or other, Storybrooke seems to be the go-to destination to (eventually) get a happy ending, even if you're not from a fairytale.(or, of course Frankenstein/Whale was furious, he came alone to Storybrooke, and everything is better with Dracula)





	

They kill Dracula, but the magic is stronger than they realized.

Wilhelmina Harker becomes…something else.

They try to kill that _something else_ , so she runs.

She tries not to feed on people—she doesn’t _turn_ them, that’s for certain.

She runs, and runs, and runs into a man with a hat that opens whole other worlds to her.

“My name is Jefferson,” he says, offering her his arm. “Trouble?”

“Oh, just a bit.” She takes his arm, gathers her skirts in her other hand, and jumps.

* * *

Jefferson balances his hat on his knee, dusting it off.

“So. Those gentlemen seemed terribly interested in killing you.”

“Yes.”

“Mind telling me why? Seeing as how I saved your life, and all.”

“ _Life_ is an interesting choice of words,” she utters a mirthless laugh.

“You look pretty alive.”

“I’m a vampire,” she tells him.

Jefferson raises an eyebrow at her.

“A _vampire_ ,” she says again. “A demon. A blood-drinker.”

“Sorry, never heard of them.”

Curious. And a relief, to be sure. She seats herself on a log across from him, flicking her skirts just so, folding her hands in her lap. “An ancient evil being that can live for centuries bit me and made me drink some of his blood, thus making me somewhat immortal and bestowing certain powers upon me.”

Jefferson whistles. “Blood magic. Strong stuff.”

“Indeed.”

“So can you do magic?”

“I can transform into a wolf, a creeping mist, or a flock of bats as required. Among other things.”

Jefferson doesn’t look all that impressed.

* * *

Jefferson’s world is nice enough, vivid and strange and bursting with magic.

The magic scares her a bit, truth be told. It makes the rules that bind her that much stronger. There is no sacramental bread, no crucifixes, but she struggles to do anything in daylight, more than she had in her world. And, of course, it’s a forest, which means there’s a damn lot of wood, and a great many trees that hurt like the very _devil_ to touch.

And she still has to be invited in, anywhere she goes. The people here are friendly, for the most part, though.

Jefferson tells her, eventually, that there are people capable of ripping hearts out of their victims while keeping them alive.

Mina doesn’t stay in the Enchanted Forest after that.

* * *

The land she winds up staying in isn’t as _bright_ as the Enchanted Forest. On the whole, it’s a bit dim.

The magic is different, too. Old and sleepy, like the heart of a forest that smells of growth and decay.

She has to feed less. She doesn’t have to ask for permission to enter places, though crucifixes and sacramental bread still burn, though it’s not as though she was Catholic to begin with.

Shifting into something else is much, much harder, and far more draining than any other place she’s been so far.

But she can eat real food again.

She likes it. She likes the darkness, and being more human. She likes the storms. She even finds work, transcribing notes for a doctor who _doesn’t_ want to kill her.

A pity, too, she had been fond of Van Helsing up to that point.

 _This_ doctor is immersed in prolonging life.

He’s a bit single minded, but he means well. Mina debates telling him about her condition. She imagines he'd say it was  _fascinating_ and then ask, very politely, to do experiments with her. The man gets all in a dither over things he sees in his microscope, and he doesn't scare her as other doctors have. 

She is  _much_ stronger than he is, after all.

* * *

* * *

It’s not quite chaos in Storybrooke in the fallout of the curse being broken. It’s very near chaos, the crowd milling around the missing board jostling for a better position—no one had seemed to realize just _how_ big Storybrooke is, or how many people it holds.

Or just how much their doctor was itching for a fight, a point proven as Whale and David exchange punches.

Nobody knows exactly how the fight started, but they all saw how it ended.

“I’m not _from_ the Enchanted Forest!” Whale shouts. “She wouldn’t bring anyone here for _me_!”

The crowd around the missing board titters. Everyone seems more interested in their shoes or fingernails than the town’s doctor.

It raises an uncomfortable question: who, exactly, _are_ their neighbors?

“The rest of you,” Whale’s words are forced past his teeth as he tries to maintain composure. “The rest of you, you came over with friends, with family. They’re still here. You all got frozen together. I don’t even know—“ his voice breaks and the people who have managed to look at him now look away as he presses his hand against his eyes. “I’ve been gone for twenty-eight years. I’m dead to my world. Who knows what I’d find even if I could get back? I’ve got _nothing_.”

* * *

The woman looks like she’d watched _Beetlejuice_ one too many times and gotten a little too attached to Lydia’s wardrobe. Emma remembered seeing her before, just around town, though she hadn’t looked so…corpse-y before.

She shoves past Emma, who winds up with her coffee down her shirt. The woman doesn’t even stop to apologize.

“What happened to my shirt?” Is the first thing Regina says when Emma enters the room where Whale is checking her for a concussion.

“That _reporter_ ,” Emma growls.

“Sidney?” Regina whips her head around, earning an exasperated sigh from Whale, who is trying to bandage her forehead.

“Nah. Some chick. After the curse broke, she got...weird. Walking around with an umbrella with no rain, collar up to her ears, gloves on all the time. It’s creepy.”

“It’s probably a parasol, dear,” Regina says, turning back so Whale can finish fixing her up. “She wasn’t from the Enchanted Forest. Her fashion sense is a little different than ours.”

Emma sees Whale stiffen at Regina’s words. Well, he wasn’t from the forest, either. Maybe a countrywoman of his, who knows? “You know who she is?”

“Yes, well,” Regina waffles. “I thought she might be useful. She actually _has_ magic. Different than mine, of course. I only met her once, but once the curse broke—well she’s a bit of a monster, and I wanted to make sure she didn’t revert back. I couldn’t let her wander around, not with Henry.” She doesn’t catch the appalled looks she’s getting. “I let her go, of course. I’m different now, and she’s not a danger. If she was, we’d know, believe you me. What _was_ her name?”

“What kind of monster was she?” Alarm creeps unbidden into Emma’s voice. “Don’t you think that’s something it might be important for us to _know_?”

Whale presses a final bandage on to Regina’s temple. “Keep it dry for forty-eight hours. If you get dizzy or nauseous, come right back to the hospital—“

“Mina, that’s what her name was.”

Whale freezes. He freezes a little too close to Regina, who huffs in disgust and pushes him away with a finger.

“And if you _must_ know, she used to be a vampire. Don’t make a fuss about it, she does really excellent crosswords for the _Mirror._ ”

Emma _is_ going to kick a fuss up about it, but before she gets the chance, Whale has bolted out of the room so fast his stool is left spinning.

“Well, I don’t know what all that was about,” Regina appears genuinely clueless before Emma makes an exasperated noise at her paired with an aborted hand gesture before she follows the doctor out.

Emma misses Whale at the front desk, catching a blur of blonde hair and white coat hem darting out of the hospital.

“Left, Sherriff,” the man at the front desk informs her, not even looking up from his paperwork. Emma has a brief moment of worrying if this person is Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dum before following.

* * *

* * *

“Mina!” His voice is hoarse, maybe from fear, maybe from nerves, maybe because he’s never used this voice to say her name. “ _Mina_!”

The woman freezes in her tracks, and Regina was right, she _is_ the reporter—Minnie Harker, god, they can kill Regina together, _later_ , he just needs—

All he wants—

Oh, they’ve an _audience_ now, delightful. Ruby he doesn’t mind, she’s been badgering him about dating since the incident on the bridge, but all those others, Regina, Swan, Snow, the insufferable _Prince_ , good god, but she’s turning—

Parasol, veiled hat, gloves to her elbows—she draws the veil up and can see paper-white skin and bloodred lips—

“Victor?”

Her voice curls through his ears, settling warm around his heart.

Victor tells his feet to move, and they do, it’s just the rest of him that doesn’t quite keep pace. Five stumbling steps before Mina takes three times as many steps in half as much time, catching his elbows and hauling him upright.

Stronger than him still, he remembers her once lifting him over her head just to prove she could, in a corset and bustle.

“Victor?” Her gloved fingers press against his cheeks; his fingers brush against her hair.

Mina growls, low in her throat, and digs her pearly-white teeth into the deep purple of her glove, yanking it off by the finger so she can run her skin along his.

Cold, but not the coldest she’s ever been.

He’s focusing on everything about her _but_ her. Taking in the details but not the whole, it’s a problem he has—

“Mina, dearest, no, don’t cry,” he brushes his thumbs at the dark spots welling at the corners of her eyes, only succeeding in smearing the blood across her pale skin. “Look at me, making a damn mess of things as usual.” Victor fumbles at his breast pocket, fishing out the navy handkerchief he always kept there when he was just Dr. Whale without even knowing why.

Dabbing at her bloodstained cheeks— _now_ he knows.

“I’ll cry if I damn well feel like it, Victor.” She does stop crying, though, a laugh bubbling out of her. “You’re right, though. Isn’t as though I’ve got a lot of blood to spare.”

Skulking around the hospital, of course. “You’re hungry. When was the last time you fed?”

Another laugh, this one nervous, those vicious teeth biting into her lower lip. “Animal blood isn’t what it used to be. There’s no magic here, I think that might be part of it.”

Victor wants to pull her close, to kiss her. He also knows that if she’s as hungry as he thinks she is—she’s a _terrible_ judge of how hungry she is; this world might have a lot of downsides but some of the words they have are perfect. “Come on,” he slides his arm around her waist, drawing her close. “I run the hospital, and I know we have some blood to spare. Nobody wants a hangry vampire roaming the streets.”

“I’m not _hangry_ , I’m just _peckish_.”

Victor ignores her. “Regina put a preservation spell on the blood so we don’t have to do as many blood drives, but it never hurts to get new.”

“It’s fine. I’m really not that hungry.” Her fingers curl around one of his belt loops, anchoring herself to him.

Victor’s the one laughing now. “The last time you told me that—“

“You know, Jefferson _never_ brings that up, and he’s the one I almost ate.”

“Yeah, well, Jefferson doesn’t exactly have a normal baseline for danger.”

“This town is full of people who’ve been cursed multiple times. Maybe _you’re_ the one with an abnormal baseline for danger.”

Victor opens his mouth.

Closes it.

“You know, I never looked at it like that.”

“Of course you didn’t. You’re a scientist. You get tunnel vision, and you always think you’re right.”

“As though you don’t always think you’re right.”

“Yes, but I usually _am_ right, whereas you are _not._ ”

He swings her around, bringing his hands up to cup her cheeks. “I have missed you,” he hazards a brief peck against her lips, “an _extraordinary_ amount.”

He sees her smile out of the corner of his eye as he ushers her into the hospital.

* * *

After a moment or two of deliberation, Victor pulls out a pint of AB+ with the thought that, as it was _full_ of antigens and Rh factor, would potentially have more flavor. Hypothetically. He also sticks it in the microwave because—

Okay, he watched True Blood. As Dr. Whale, he’d watched True Blood.

Some things really do make more sense now that the curse has been lifted.

“Did she really lock you up?” He passes her the container of blood.

Mina takes a long draw of it, eyes closing as if it’s the most delicious thing she’s ever tasted. “Who?”

“Regina.”

“Oh. Well, yeah.” She takes another pull before catching his expression. “Victor, I _am_ a vampire. She just wanted to keep people safe.”

Victor closes his eyes and counts to ten. “That doesn’t make it okay.”

“If I tell myself it’s not okay, I’ll kill her.”

“Ah. Still bloodthirsty, then.”

Mina rolls her eyes at the old joke, but can’t hide her smile. “That’s not funny.”

“Then why do you always laugh at it?”

“I’m not laughing!” She utters something that most would think was a hiccup.

“Hah! Laugh. Right there.” He gestures to the bag in her hands, the one that she seems to be debating ripping open and licking the insides of. “Do you need more? When was the last time you had human blood?”

She doesn’t answer right away, so he sticks a bag of B- in the microwave, so he’s not facing her when she tells him.

“Well, we were here for twenty-eight years and I was regular human. And then Regina had me under lockdown for seven months, and then the three that I’ve been out and about—“

“Almost a year? That’s—you’ve never been able to go that long! I wonder if it’s because there’s no magic here…” he trails off as he turns to hand Mina the second serving of blood. She’s smiling at him. “What?”

“You. All science, all the time.”

“Mina, I didn’t mean—“

“Victor, don’t be silly.” Her hand curls against his cheek, stroking up to card her fingers through his hair. “You have a marvelous brain, and I missed it.” Her skin is warm against his.

“You are marvelous inside and outside, from top to bottom, and I missed _all_ of you.”

“Well,” Mina looks rather insufferably pleased, flushing with embarrassment and blood, before fishing a notebook out of who knows where. She scribbles something down before handing it over to Victor.

She’s written the date at the top followed by _ate and was no longer angry; Victor was correct_.

“For science,” she informs him.

“Of course. For science.”


End file.
